How the Fire Code Team is helping businesses and schools reopen safely
Aug. 17, 2020
Unless you’re a business owner of anything from a day care to a dance club, you probably don’t think about fire codes very much. But the Minnesota State Fire Code affects your life in tangible ways – especially now that we’re in the middle of a pandemic where we all need a lot more space to stay safe. Fortunately, there’s a group of Minnesotans whose job it is to help us interpret the fire code. Appropriately, they’re called the Fire Code Team.
The Fire Code Team is part of our State Fire Marshal Division. The team’s mission is to save lives and property, reduce business interruption, and minimize the environmental impact from fire and hazardous materials. They provide fire safety regulations that can be used throughout Minnesota to help reduce the number and severity of fires. There are 10 people on the team: a fire code specialist and experts who focus on such subjects as schools, health care facilities, fire alarms, fireworks and explosives.
In a typical month, the Fire Code Team handles just shy of 200 calls or emails from local fire code officials, business owners, general contractors and the general public. The most common questions are about the fire code in general, day care licensing and sprinklers.
Then May rolled around, and businesses were told they could start opening up again after the COVID-19 stay at home order. Specifically, on May 20, Gov. Tim Walz said certain businesses could open at 25 percent capacity. But what exactly did that mean? The phone calls and emails started coming in fast.
On May 21 alone, the Fire Code Team fielded 78 inquiries. For a team that averages 10 per day, it was a steep increase. They fielded 339 inquiries total in May, many of them related to beauty salons and how to calculate their occupant load at 25 percent. The State Fire Code has a chapter that deals with occupant loads based on square footage, so the team was ready to help.
They worked quickly to develop information sheets, which they perfected over the course of a few days. Once they had the salons squared away, they were ready for bars and restaurants. They too needed help calculating capacity at 25 percent (that number is now up to 50 percent) to comply with the executive order, and they also needed help with topics like partitions and rules from the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Currently, the Fire Code Team is fielding inquiries from school officials about partitions. Schools are being creative in making their spaces safer, using items like shower curtains for partitions. The Fire Code Team helps make sure their creative ideas are safe.
Most of the team’s calls and email exchanges end with positive comments: “That is so helpful. Thank you.” The people they help simply want to know what to do so they can reopen safely, and the Fire Code Team is here to help them do so.
